Amybeth Hale

Amybeth Hale began her career in recruiting working for Jon Bartos as the sole researcher for his award-winning MRI-affiliated executive search firm in Cincinnati. She then served as the Manager of Internet Research for SearchPath International out of Cleveland, OH. She previously was editor of The Fordyce Letter and FordyceLetter.com. She's returned to her first love, sourcing, and now works for Microsoft. You can connect with her on Twitter at @researchgoddess.

Articles by Amybeth Hale...

No, seriously, I am — at least, that’s what www.humanforsale.com told me. I took their survey and the resulting value on my person was nearly $2 million. Of course, I’d like to think that I am priceless. (Waiting while you all vomit…) Try it for yourself and see what you’d go for on eBay…

But getting serious (and because that site doesn’t take into account the fact that I’m a sourcer) — let’s talk about what sourcing is worth. What are you, as a professional people-hunter/sourcer/search ninja actually worth? keep reading…

Our sister site, SourceCon.com, which provides news, knowledge, and information for the recruitment sourcing community, has revised its email subscription option and is pleased to let you know that it is now ready and available for registration. The new email subscription service, SourceCon Weekly, will deliver your subscription to SourceCon news via email each week on Thursdays. This new service will be replacing the old daily FeedBlitz email subscription service, and the hope is that it will provide a better user experience for you!

It seems that the whole world is a-buzz about this new website called Quora. Every day for the past week or so, I have at least fifteen new emails in my inbox with notifications that so-and-so has started following me on Quora. My first introduction to Quora was back in August of 2010, when a local friend and social media buff, Tac Anderson, sent me an email inviting me to check it out — “You should really check this site out. I’m liking it a lot.” I received a couple other invitations to join, with comments like “Just thought you’d be a good contributor to Quora content and all” and “Thought you might be interested in questions and answers about Recruiters, Hiring, and Social Recruiting.”

This morning, at its first ever user conference, Talent Connect, LinkedIn revealed two brand new product offerings to its “Recruiter” customers: Jobs For You and Referral Engine. David Hahn, LinkedIn’s VP of Product Management, and Deep Nishar, LinkedIn’s VP Products & User Experience, shared details of the new offerings with attendees as well as the story of how the new Jobs For You product came to be.

Over on our sister site, SourceCon.com, there is a report that that Seattle-based startup TalentSpring, an SaaS-based candidate sourcing solution that uses semantic search technology to find exceptional resume matches for job requisitions, has been acquired. The big news (and until now a mystery) is by whom — top sources say that the acquiring company is Talent Technology, a Canada-based company which produces HireDesk and Resume Mirror.

Starting today at noon Eastern, the sourcing world will turn its attention to Washington, D.C. as SourceCon kicks off from the International Spy Museum. I don’t think anyone can argue that there is a more fitting venue at which to host the premier sourcing event than the spy museum.

If you can’t make it in person, you can still catch much of the great content by watching the live stream carried here on the ERE.net homepage or at www.sourcecon.com.

Things will get kicked off at noon Eastern on Tuesday, September 28th and will continue on Wednesday starting at 8:45 a.m. Eastern. You can find the full schedule of sessions here.

You can watch the stream online right here on ERE.net, or you can watch on the SourceCon homepage, participate in the live chat, and follow the event on Twitter using the #SourceCon hashtag. Just click the ‘play’ button on the uStream box and you are all set!

Last week, SourceCon ran the first part of an article series on Twitter’s Hiring Strategies, outlining some of the significant new hires Twitter has made this year. I also showed you the video that Twitter put out to help its recruiting efforts. I was able to grab about 30 minutes with Twitter’s director of recruiting, Oliver Ryan, and talk to him about some of the recruiting and hiring practices that Twitter has in place for its internal efforts. While Twitter has talked with severaltechmediapublishers about their recruiting video, this is the first time it has talked about their recruiting practices directly with the HR, recruiting, and sourcing community.

Oliver Ryan, Director of Recruiting (or “People Wrangler” as it states in his LinkedIn profile), joined Twitter about a year ago. When he arrived, there were no full-time recruiting resources at Twitter, and total headcount was only around 40 employees. Since then, Ryan was offered a full-time position and the company has grown to over 250 employees, with the recruiting team now at eleven people.

Everyone is buzzing about social media these days. Is it a waste of time? Is it helpful from a business standpoint? Can other industries besides the PR/marketing folks, the political talking heads, and the tech geeks benefit from being involved? Or is it just a major time suck?

I would venture to guess that your personal feelings on any of these questions are directly tied to the level of involvement you currently have in social media. Those of you who have put time and effort — TRUE time and effort — into understanding how social media tools work, are seeing the positive results.

And those of you who have merely dabbled in it here and there aren’t seeing what you thought you would.

Keep in mind — social media is, quite simply, social. You get out of it what you put in. And you have to contribute first before you can expect to get anything in return.

This may not be the answer you were looking for, but truly, there are some things in life that you can’t shortcut and be truly successful at. Diets, marriage, and building fulfilling and lasting relationships all take time and lots of effort to find true success. Just ask anyone who’s had to shed a few pounds or who has been happily married for a long time.

I am looking forward to addressing some of these items during my discussion at The Fordyce Forum coming up this June.

It is important to first understand what social media is, because understanding is the first and most important step of mastering anything in life. I’ve been having conversations with some folks in the HR and recruiting world who have embraced social media tools and have seen some great results in their recruitment efforts, so I’ll discuss that as well.

And I’m looking forward to some lively crowd interaction as well as a few surprises I’ve got planned. Even if you can’t attend, make sure to check out my hashtag, #VegasRG, to keep up with — and maybe participate in — what’s going on in the training session.

For those of you who will be attending, I want you to start thinking about what social media tools you’ve already begun using, and what you’ve learned from those experiences. Have you had positive or negative results? What have you observed others doing? Have you engaged a professional consultant or have you been learning on your own?

My only request? Come with an open mind and a clean slate. Proper thought process about the use of social media tools, in my opinion, is more important than understanding all of the technical “ins and outs” of them. I am excited to see you in Vegas in just a few short weeks!

In trying to summarize my experience at the Web 2.0 conference, I find myself thinking about how quickly technology changes the way we work, play, and in general live our lives. I’m 29 years old, and I can remember my first Atari, first Commodore 64 computer (later upgraded to a 128), my first PC, the first time I logged onto AOL (and racked up a couple of $400 bills when they still charged by the minute!), and my first cell phone (a big clunky plastic analog thing). I remember the first time I discovered chat through BBS systems, the first time I went on a date with someone I’d met online (this was way before it became socially acceptable to do so!), and the first time I sent a text message.

In reflecting back on all this stuff, I started trying to recall what I did before I had these technologies available to me. I’m sure this is a question that many of you have asked yourselves as well, especially those of you in the ‘Baby Boomer’ generation, who can remember back way further than I ever could.

Seriously, how did we survive? What did we do for entertainment? Has technology really dumbed us down so much that we literally cannot find each other in a crowd without calling or texting our locations? Are we losing the ability to communicate face to face with each other because technology has allowed us the luxury of communicating through non-verbal and impersonal means?

So many companies, so little time! I probably didn’t make it to half the booths in the expo hall at the Web 2.0 Expo last week in San Francisco. But several of the companies I did get to speak with had new tools that will certainly be of interest to those of us in research, sourcing, and recruiting.

I had many opportunities to speak with start-up entrepreneurs who were attending with hopes of gaining venture capital support. This conference was a great venue for many to talk with established technologists and business owners about their ideas, and an event called Launch Pad was held. Six new companies had the opportunity pitch their business for five minutes on stage, in front of the Web 2.0 Expo audience and a panel of VC judges. The six finalists, who were chosen through submission and panel review before the conference, were Acquia, Chirp Interactive, JobScore, Oortle, TradeVibes, and Triggit. Each company received feedback on its presentation right then and there from both the VC judges and the audience, and the VCs were given the option to offer these applicants non-binding term sheets for financing.

Following Launch Pad, I was able to spend about an hour chatting one-on-one with Dan Arkind. He has a rich, hands-on recruiting background and is one of the co-founders of JobScore (profile). Those of you who attended the start-up session at ERE in San Diego will remember JobScore — a new product targeted at in-house recruiting teams that “breaks down the walls” between different companies and empowers them to working directly with each other.

Businesses big and small convened on San Francisco last week for the Web 2.0 Expo, all with different agendas — to launch new products, to gain VC funding, to keep an eye on the competition, and over all to celebrate this thing we call Web 2.0. I had the absolute pleasure of attending the conference due to the generosity of Dave Manaster at ERE Media (you can read the story about how it all came about here) and had opportunity after opportunity to meet some fascinating people.

During the course of the week, I met a variety of attendees, from technology directors to marketing folks, from CEOs of brand new companies to engineers from industry giants. In talking with many of these people, I found that several of them had attended the conference with the goal of finding talented people to come work with them.

So naturally, since I was attending representing a recruiting resource (and being an advocate of making strategic networking connections), I offered to help them out by bringing some of their needs to the attention of the ERE audience. You can check out some of the folks in this video I’ve made.

In lieu of doing a complete recap today, I wanted to share some great information about a brand new way Yahoo! has come up with to use its search engine, called SearchMonkey. Yahoo! had talked about this new way to show search results a couple months ago, but it was showcasing it today at the exhibition hall at the Web 2.0 Expo.

Basically, it takes Yahoo’s search engine and allows you to see into the data on the results link without having to click on the link:

Yahoo has combined “a free, open platform with structured, semantic content from across the Web.” SearchMonkey “gives all Web site owners an opportunity to present more useful information on the Yahoo! Search page as compared to what is presented on other search engines. Site owners will be able to provide all types of additional information about their site directly to Yahoo! Search. So instead of a simple title, abstract and URL, for the first time users will see rich results that incorporate the massive amount of data buried in websites — ratings and reviews, images, deep links, and all kinds of other useful data — directly on the Yahoo! Search results page.”

-From San Francisco, a report from the Web 2.0 Expo and what recruiters can learn from the goings-on.

As early as 7:30 Tuesday morning, I was meeting neat people. I sat at a table for breakfast with Sharon Shafer, a librarian at UCLA. She shared some interesting thoughts on research techniques. Sharon said that she believes a lot of research is being duplicated simply because due diligence is not done and people do not know how to look stuff up these days.

I spend about 20 minutes dorking out with her about research. I also met Sam Lawrence, the CMO for Jive Software (pictured) who had broken his ankle and, using Twitter, gotten a couple of companies to sponsor his wheelchair so that he could attend the conference.